It's aliiiiive. (For now.)

Things have been quiet around here lately because I managed to kill both of my computers.

So for the past few days, my laptop has been at a local Mac body shop doing its inimitable impression of roadkill. The desktop has been sitting in my study thumbing its nose at me. My only access to the internet was via the PC in my son's room. Hence the relative dearth of posts. It seemed kind of insensitive to barge in there and pound away at the keyboard while he was trying to sleep.

So anyway, the good news is that Apple is getting ready to send me a brand new iBook.

See, the last time I called them, I ripped the customer service representative a new one. In fact, I completely reconstructed his means of egress. By the time I was through with him, he could have driven a Volkswagon Beetle up there and parked it next to the Escalade. Unfortunately, this approach netted me only another free repair. Which means I performed aural surgery on the guy and what did I get for my trouble? A two year-old laptop with a habit of breaking down just when it's needed most.

So this time I decided that Apple was going to give me a new computer.

I read somewhere on someone's blog that Apple totally sucked! No, wait a minute, actually Apple was so wonderful. This other blogger's situation was similar to mine, and she ended up with a lovely brand-spanking-new iBook. (Of course, now I can't find that particular series of blog entries, but if you click here, you'll see what I've been going through. Thanks to Melissa at Suburban Bliss for giving the voice to my pain.)

So anyway, back to Apple. I decided to act nice. I was completely charming and sweet to the customer service guy, and then, once I had him pretty much eating out of my hand, I remarked--rather diffidently--that since they've repaired this laptop six times in two years, could we agree that my so-called Apple was actually more of a lemon? Ar ar ar. And the gentleman on the other end of the line allowed as how six repairs in two years is asking a Bit Much, even of a devoted Apple consumer. And he gave me a new one. Yay, me!

But I don't have it yet. I've got to send it back before they'll send me a new one. Before I do that, I need to get the data out of the old one. So it's at the body shop getting chopped.

So tonight I figured, what the hell, I'll see if the desktop will boot up.

So I turned it on, holding down shift-control-option (which I have been told cleanses the chakras or resets the PRAM or something along those lines). And lo and behold, it booted right up.

I won't say "I hate it when that happens," because it certainly beats waking up my son to blog. But I must say, it's incredibly, annoyingly random. A desktop that works about as often--but not as regularly--as a stopped clock, and takes up a square foot of real estate in a study that is always on the verge of being condemned by the housing authorities for overcrowding isn't earning its keep and badly needs to be donated to whatever charity would be stupid enough to take it.

So I think I'll donate it to the local branch of the Republican party.

OK, I'm just kidding. Just making with the funny for my Republican readers (both of them.)

I would never do that. Because with my luck, once I give it away, the stupid thing will probably start working flawlessly. Or, if it starts acting hinky, the Republicans will probably know that fancy chakra-cleansing PRAM trick.

Well, duh, of course they know it. They just used it on Dubya.

Heh heh heh. I crack me up.

--P.